Day by day this Mantle smells like vaporware, just like ex-Intel's Larabee...
I totally agree;
AMD meeting minutes....
Issue:
we're in deep do do, there's no way we can keep up with Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. If we don't come up with something, ANYTHING we're gone, our finances are a mess!!
Solution:
ok, we're going to have to hit this big time. Lets get into bed with the developer of the biggest game this year, BF4, and influence its design and coding. Let's hype it up so much that people aren't surprised when it's so CPU resource heavy.
.....but how's that going to help with our weak CPUs?
We'll it's not going to be actually CPU heavy, we'll artificially make it so. It's risky because people might wonder why it runs well on a crappy XB1 APU but needs 80% of an o/c'd I5-3570k, but I think we can get away with it. We'll say PCs aren't optimised, but consoles are, no-one will question it.
.....but I still don't get it.
We'll then launch this software add-on called Mantle and hype it up to be the coming of the next messiah. This add-on will detect what type of CPU and GPU the user has and remove the artificial limitation for all those with weak AMD CPU's/APU and our later R9-xxx GPUs (we might help the tight-ass 7xxx owners later, but for now we'll
tell them it's for all GCN cards to make people consider switching to AMD from Nvidia, that's how we'll also claw back some GPU sales, then we'll say it just supports R9-xxx GPUs with 7xxx support coming later, we'll drag it out as long as possible, until our next big sponsored game comes along).
As BF4 is the biggest and most talked about game, along with the game changing Mantle, everyone will think that you no longer need a decent Intel CPU and will buy our cheap and crappy APUs and couple them with our new R9-xxx's. We'll hype it up so much and drag it out with various excuses for delays, optimisation, beta tests, support etc that no-one will become suspicious before we collude with the next game developer to do the same again.
It's win, win. We increase the sales of our CPUs and GPUs, whilst implementing nothing but a software switch in Mantle. Genius!!!